A new stablecoin consortium backed by more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and PayPal, is aiming to challenge the Tether-Circle duopoly. Its key differentiator is that participating institutions will share in the token’s revenue.

As with most ambitious industry initiatives, the announcement has divided opinion. Among the sceptics is the director of digital assets research at Ark Invest, who argues that a network of competitors will struggle to move quickly enough to compete with vertically integrated issuers.

But history adds more texture to the picture once you zoom into the motivations of successful for-profit consortia. Coordination tends to be easier when the goal is to break entrenched market power.

The Open Handset Alliance brought together competing technology firms to build Android to challenge the Apple-BlackBerry smartphone duopoly. Airbus began as a European consortium designed to counter American dominance in commercial aviation. The same story applies to Star Alliance and SEMATECH in the semiconductor industry.

As stablecoin adoption grows, many of the institutions entering the space are unwilling to rely on, and thereby further entrench, the existing Tether-Circle duopoly. That incentive outweighs the coordination challenge if stablecoins are here to stay.